FinTech Magazine - November 2021 | Page 88

SINGLESTORE
“ The point was being able to explain that the market was going to be big enough for new players to come in .”
In the last 10 months , SingleStore has raised over $ 160m from investors , which values the company at around a billion dollars .
Verma cites the success of MongoDB and its rivals as a sign that the market has shaken off the old guard . Post going public Mongo was valued at around three billion dollars ($ 3bn ).
“ The last time I checked , Mongo is worth ten times that initial offering at around thirtytwo billion ($ 32bn ). Now , that ' s a validation that there is a change of guard in what is happening across the database market .
As we were digesting the success of MongoDB , who I think executed brilliantly , we had Snowflake hitting the open market and it is now a hundred-billion-dollar ($ 100bn ) company .”
Raj Verma points out that this would value Snowflake at around eighty percent ( 80 %) of IBM ’ s market cap .
Paradigm shift in the covid age Raj Verma talks about how the database business is not only expanding in size but more importantly , in what services database companies - especially the newer ones – can now offer customers . He also says the Covid era was partly responsible for escalating this change .
“ I do think that the last 18 months has fundamentally made a huge paradigm shift as to how companies use data .
Pre-covid even some of the most avid users of data used it as ‘ taillights ’ to assess a company ’ s progress : To measure what happened , to learn and to implement new strategies based on the way they analyse their data . Data was used primarily to execute decision making .
However , in the Covid era data can no longer be used as ‘ taillight ’. It has to be used as a ‘ headlight ’. It has to help you see through the fog that we are all experiencing in our business and personal lives .”
Verma says the challenges of Covid have forced us to use a database in real time . It has made us demand information based on the data we feed to help us predict the actions we take . This has been highlighted in the way we now expect to order food from our smartphones and know exactly when it will arrive , or know exactly when to walk onto the street to pick up a ride-share .
It also enables the service provider to marry up an array of conditions . In the
88 November 2021